*For the next week or so, I’m going to add a random film the great Ray Harryhausen worked on. The legendary special effects MASTER passed away on May 7, 2013 at age 92 in London and yes, the film world owes him more than they can ever repay…
1969’s The Valley of Gwangi is a bit of a bittersweet classic for many fans of Harryhausen’s work. By this time, stop motion animated fantasy films weren’t drawing the audiences they did ten years earlier, so this film didn’t get the promotion it deserved. It wasn’t the first cowboy meets dinosaur flick at all – that honor goes to 1956’s The Beast of Hollow Mountain, produced by Harryhausen’s mentor, Willis O’Brien.
While that older film’s effects weren’t done by O’Brien (and despite a few cool scenes, it showed), Harryhausen’s vision for the project (which O’Brien had wanted to do for decades) links the two masters together thanks to some incredible animation that ended up being the final dinosaur film he worked on in his career…
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For some fans of giant monster movies, Godzilla is their gold standard, but I’m a Rhedosaurus man, myself. 1953’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is a smaller-scale picture when compared to Toho’s epic genre entry and it’s also not as sprawling and dynamic as King Kong in terms of impact. On the other hand, Ray Harryhausen’s work here is superb and at a mere 80 minutes, this one goes down easy and doesn’t wear out its welcome one bit.
From the moment you hear Bernard Herrmann’s outstanding main theme that sets up the thrilling adventure ahead, director Nathan Juran’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad sets itself squarely in fantasy film history as a true classic. Of course, having Ray Harryhausen on board and in full charge of the film’s effects work at the height of his talents makes this one an absolute must-see as well as one of the best genre films ever made. It’s a perfect blending of talents by all involved and it’s probably the one film Harryhausen worked on I’ve seen the most times as have many who’ve been influenced by it over the decades. This film was yet another hit for Harryhausen and producer Charles H. Schneer and also introduced the word Dynamation into the movie lexicon (later rechristened “Super DynaMation” and later, “Dynarama”), which amusingly enough, ONLY refers to the stop motion technique the master perfected over time and became an immediate means of letting his fans know who was behind the visual effects in that latest cinematic treat they wanted to catch…
I’d only heard of this horror anthology film a few years back thanks to a friend who saw the restored final third and raved about it. Of course, I never got the chance to check that, nor the rest of this film out until recently when the movie popped up on TCM and after a sluggish first segment, had me glued to the couch taking in the assorted sights and sounds.
While it has some great creature and scenic effects, some terrifically lousy acting and ridiculous dialog plus a few plot elements nearly sink 20,000,000 Miles to Earth like the doomed spacecraft that brings the Ymir into movie monster history.
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